The blackness rising was not smoke, but ash. Ruined carcases finally leaving to the world beyond this one, heaven or hell, or perhaps another purgatory. Somewhere in the hills beyond this gate they were turning to ash and flying into the sky, never to be seen or thought of again. Even the memories of the people here faded unnaturally quickly when they departed from Remoria. The green skinned guard didn’t know or let such matters concern him as he stood his post, one of a two man team on the tower tonight. Vine covered stones reached with their tendrils to caress his fingers—he quickly moved his hand away from his partner’s gesture.
“Stop it. Have some respect.”
“For what?”
The man next to him chose to have the vines in his hair longer, more flowery and kept. Not often would you see him without a spray bottle on his hip, prepared to give himself a touching up if he looked a little withered. Even for a Blost he was fruity.
“The ash. Some of the outer rings reported a mass exodus of people from the north going to the mountain to die. Hundreds in the same suicide pact. I doubt they even brought gear…with the way it billows and all.”
Spritz spritz. There he went again. He patted the well curled bleeding hearts on his shoulder.
“Oh spare me. I care not for the dead and the ash they ruin the sky with. Passing on from Remoria into the great unknown that was supposed to be their grave is their own damn business. Keeping you and myself healthy and brimming with light is mine.”
He made no more advances toward his guardmate that night, the both of them sitting in an only occasionally misty silence atop of Trimbuli’s main tower. The world outside of the plant race, the world that welcomed pink haired humans and walking skeletons, or even beasts with human hearts; it perplexed him.
In all the wide madness of the Remorian world, how did any individual stay sane? How did a single soul outlive the masses of ashen sky for days on end? At even this comparatively smaller cloud of darkness, the guard felt his insides run cold, as if his moving blood had slowed to an icy crawl.
To turn to ash and be forgotten forever. What an end to a promise at a second life that was.
Day three thousand and thirteen without his lamp had been a stumbling success.
The guard wished his heart covered mate goodnight, walking slowly down the steep staircase and into the towers insides, where his bunk would await him just a few hundred paces below. Once he was gone, the other guard leaned his entire chest on the brick, vine covered top of his post, setting water sprayer down unevenly among some leaves. A fine holder. The condensation would supply that little vine for at least a week to come.
His bleeding hearts began to droop, turning from one shade to another. No water had satisfied their need in a long time. To give it a proper place atop the tower, for it spent more time there than he did, was only fitting.
Placing a sturdy boot on the bricks above him, he only mourned the bruising that the vines would suffer as he plummeted to rejoin the earth below.
Day five thousand and twenty without his lamp had been a failure.

Those who are afflicted, in a way, share a soul. They’ve the same experiences, trials and downfalls. There is a kind of disease that rots at the soul, turning living beings with great potential into nothing more than walking husks. These people live among the living, but are disinterested in this world entirely. So the fact that there is someone there, someone who understands you, hardly even matters.
They have lost all joy with this world. Many choose to inherit their riches in another one. A world within themselves, one where they can live forever. Whether this world was created through demons, magic, or the delirious will of man in his last gasp of life none can tell. But those who are chosen to visit this undying land to lord over it call this place Remoria, The Land of Wandering Souls.

The path to the end of Remoria was long and gradually waning in color. The tower city of Trimbuli acted as one of the last guarding forces before the lands of wild men and beasts. While there was civilization beyond their walls, the Blost hardly considered them hospitable, and often advised wandering citizens to turn back or come inside Trimbuli’s loving, stone arms. With the passing of the guard in the moments before twilight, no one was there to notice a small figure on the path, cloaked from head to foot and of small stature, just barely blotching the grey dusty road. Plants fought to stay alive here, without the water that Trimbuli pumped in great supply for their own citizens. The expanse of black dirt running out in all directions made disguising her presence rather easy. However, she didn’t care if she was seen or not.
Her warmness was gone.
She clutched the metal in her hand, as if her will alone could keep it from cooling. The base of the candle held a tiny pool of wax, useless now with the fire gone and the wick subdued. Her eyes hung to it as if leaving its presence, where he flame had once been, would make such a fate terribly real. She had been careful, but now it was over. Yet with all of her preperation, all of her exploring of Remoria, she couldn’t find the same color in those moments again.
It was just as it had been before. It was colder now that the memories were there. In her daily life she had owned no kind of beautiful salvation. She had secured no peace like the candle and Remoria gave her. Simply living in an endless grey, death was welcomed when it came. Now she felt the nothingness in all its forces of evil. She felt it anew in the place that once harbored a soul.
Curls, golden on her head, were beginning to lose their shape as they descended with their own sense of newfound gravity. She was late. She had missed them. The ash rose in the sky. Above her small trees, or small to the common man, dropped over her like a canopy. Red leaves, permanent in this region, splayed out long and wet from a perpetual drizzle off of black thin branches. Masses of these trees, more present in the forest she emerged from, gave the Trimbuli southern forest a bloody, worn foreground. When the air wasn’t filled with the smoke of the burning roots from that forest, it was from the ash of passing souls in the sky.
Trimbuli remained resolute, even when the centerpiece of Remoria’s baneful fate. Its citizens prided themselves on their playful, green, happy heaven within this purgatory.
Not a lamp or a prayer could save them now. The ash collected and cast a darker path as she walked. The cloak she clutched around herself, it offered no help against the storm. There was no wind—her coldness breathed for her as she walked forward. That unending coldness, that place of void in her chest, it was what kept her moving. It demanded an answer. It demanded to join them in the sky, to become a part of that cloud.
It shifted. Acceptable. A temporary relief from the pain, this hope. Her small fingers loosened around the dead candle’s base slightly, almost shaking from the cold. When she witnessed the end of her pilgrimage, albeit alone, she would be able to rest. She would be warm, then. In her solemn walk, she tried commanding the thoughts, her memories to reappear and kindle but an ash of genuine hope in her mind.
The path of flowers. Her first real sunset. Her favorite color. The way she enjoyed the juice more than the apple. The crunch of sand in her fists. The satisfying feeling of pulling bark off a tree.
But none of those feelings came. She continued to walk. There was nothing but silence and ash here. Nearing the castle of Trimbuli, the small wind subsided as her form took shelter under the brick’s sturdy travail. Stone towers had stood here for generations, for many lifetimes before her arrival. How many little girls walked this road before her? She wished she had not been late. She wished she had passed those duties onto Icarus; he would have been willing to help if she had simply left out the destination of her journey.
“You there! Stop where you are immediately!”
Interruptions would stop her, and like an object without the energy from a push to move forward, she would never arrive to the end of Remoria if she was captured now. She began to run, darting off the path and toward the castle walls where rubble had fallen some ages ago. Blost were a perfectionist people, but getting a team strong enough to move that saving grace of a stone was another matter entirely. She crouched behind its safety as she heard the message being passed on from Blost guardsman to guardsman.
With her knees to her chin, she felt her own hair brush against her skin and flinched. It was dry like hay, and once she looked to examine it, she tried to determine if it was changing color. Would she be a Sugri, hair pink and brittle? Perhaps it was turning to vines or crusty leaves like her pursuers. If they caught her, at least she would be welcomed there and could perhaps sneak out later. If she were to become a Sugri however, she may need to wait for the next caravan. No three weeks or months were hers to spare, not with her candle gone.
“No…it isn’t pink,” she thought to herself, “The Sugri have curls and I’ve lost mine.” Her hair nearly broke into pieces in her fingertips. Heavily armored footsteps came thundering down the stone tower next to her and she huddled within herself, covering her head with the cloak. The complete darkness, the ice from a wind that wasn’t there bit her face. For all the reasons in the world and beyond she missed her candle, but the light was one of those minor, subtle, constant reminders. The absence of a light everywhere she went, even when she wanted to sleep. The soft glow of a night light, as far back as her childhood before her fall, she tried to remember. But the memory was murky, faded, inaccurate, and not warm at all.
The strand of hair she gripped between her fingers fell out.
“No…!” she whispered in a shrill hoarseness, backing away and dropping the piece reflexively. The dim light from outside her cloak showed that the strand was not pink or green, but black. When the dust of the earth touched it, the strand of her once beautiful hair turned to dust and began to mingle with the earth. The door at the base of the tower was slammed open. A Blost man, tall with hair made of bark and darker than the earth began to shout.
“Search the path and perimeter! She could be one of the suicide pact from yesterday! The time is past, if she resists you bring her to me. If she’s a Bane, don’t engage unless I tell you to.”
The girl scrambled from her place behind the rocks, crawling on all fours to press against the tower and its recently cracked foundation. Her previous guess that these rocks were ancient was wrong. This must have happened as recent as yesterday. Was a guard angry after seeing the pact take place at the mountain? She looked at the broken foundation, spying a small hole just as metal clanging from the jogging of Blost moved closer to her rubble pile. The foundation walls of the cracked space rubbed harshly against her shoulders and heels as she ventered further in without a light. Once sufficiently inside, she found a space where she could emerge and crouch to about half her height. Breathing became slightly easier as she heard the angered chaos of the guards outside.
The broken cavern was dark, but she was content to stay still. She hoped they would tire of their search soon and go back inside their little heaven of a city. “Go home,” she thought, “Go home and enjoy your entertainment. Go inside and relax, look at the colors your little world has to offer of you. Go to your places of rest and sleep another day, conquer your lightness existence for another time. Build another wall around yourselves, maintain your fantasies and stories. Go home. Let me go to my place. Let me be alone.”
Again the darkness pricked at her, not externally, but in the reminding pointed edges that stung her eyes. Darnkess. Her lamp would have laughed at this darkness. Her time on earth in her bedroom would have also laughed at this darkness. Emptiness had become her playing ground, and a darkness like this hardly would have scared her before she came to Remoria. Now that her candle was gone, now that she had sufficiently rested in the warm blanket of normalcy, she couldn’t face this darkness as she had done before. Reaching out to touch the walls of her newfound enclosure, she crept forward with useless eyes and found something sturdy just below her knees.
What she gripped faded into powder in her hands. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, she squinted as she rubbed her palms free of the dust. At her feet rested a gathered bunch of bleeding hearts, withered and attached to a now half crumbled Blost guard’s head.
She screamed. Like a cornered fox she dug her way out of the den and gripped the large rocks covering their entrance, blinking at the dim light outside. Guards shouted at her presence, more of her hair fell from her head.
“Bane! She is a Bane child!”
Running from her place without a chance to recover, she was forced to chance her strides back on the dusty path toward the mountain. If they caught her as a Bane they would never let her leave that tower, not with her eyes or hands. The darkness would be unrecoverable, and without her candle, she might as well become blind the instant they grabbed her from this road. Her fingernails dug into her palms. If she felt them on her back, she could do it. Her palm bled into her fingertips, blood that she knew bled clear, not red.
She had to do it if they caught her. Past trees and fading grassy life she ran, guards in a surprised but fervent pursuit. Her breaths were hoarse as she struggled on in and endless sprint. Her nails dug deeper. She could do it. She just had to make sure she succeeded. Blost could heal quickly.
The path ran west in a few paces, a quick decision for her running speed. Without shoes to keep her traction, her speed betrayed her. Sliding unintentionally, she found herself slamming at all speed into a fallen black log almost twenty meters from the castle. The faint jostling metal of the Blost began to edge closer. Bane speed was unnatural, just as she had heard from the rumors. More clear blood spouted from her leg as a black large splinter pierced her thigh. Quickly up and on again, she limped quickly back on the path as fast as she could. The guards were advancing, now faster than she could ever hope to move.
She had to do it now, while there was time. Without slowing down, she let her fingernails emerge from her clenched fist. Had she more time in Remoria, she might have tried admiring the clear, thick fluid that was now her blood. But she hadn’t the luxury of more than a few moments. She placed her hand to her throat, other hand to her elbow and prepared for a concentrated thrust into her own neck.
Then the roar pierced the air of that twilight. A massive beast leaped over her, as if it didn’t notice, and careened down the path past the log she had fallen into. The guards, running in heavy armor, didn’t have time to turn around before the bear-wolf tore into the first with a single massive paw to the abdomen. Crushing him underneath its weight, thick maw with directionless teeth bared at the second who was close behind, but missed him narrowly as he skidded to a stop and fell on his back, scrambling against his own momentum to get away. The beast roared, mighty and bellowing in the shallow silence that once surrounded Trimbuli. It became the problem that would neccesitate the plant race’s entire army.
She knew that those who became beasts like this retained very little, or perhaps none of their human-born sentience once they turned. Arms weary and bleeding little, they fell at her sides as she watched the brutal handiwork of the creature eliminate the Blost guards. One produced a horn, but before he could place it to his lips, the bear-wolf crunched it under its own massive jaws. Shaking his skull to make rid of the bone horn, its eyes wild with fury met the girls.
She yanked the log piece out of her thigh. Clear blood flowed like crystalline.
It was just a moment, but that was all it took for her decision to finally come. Like a light in the darkness, she finally had found what her alternative to joining the pact might be. With her newfound strength as a Bane, she began to run. Her blood would leave a crystal trail for miles, but the loss and her pursuers were no longer her concern.
Concern. She had finally found it. The rarest commodity in Remoria.